Today, connectivity is essential for every business and every human endeavor. As a result, business requirements are fueling further evolution and innovation in the network. Triple play services including simultaneous voice, data and video are provided in legacy networks using carrier Ethernet and Metropolitan Ethernet. Although these networks have many advantages over earlier ATM, SONET and SDH networks, they have introduced some problems.
There has been a massive explosion in the number of customers for services on these networks, increasing the number of simultaneous connections. Simultaneously, Ethernet has become the media of choice for the core and edges of the carrier's networks. Although excellent, simple and easy to deploy, Ethernet has a few inherent problems. One is the scalability of deploying many customer connections over the carrier public network and the other is security. Earlier deployments of core infrastructure have used VLAN tagging and Q-in-Q. Each of these methods solves some problems but still retains problems inherent to Ethernet networks including vulnerabilities to certain attacks and configuration mistakes including ARP or adjacency table poisoning; malicious or intentional Denial of Service by introducing duplicate Media Access Control (MAC) addresses or other mechanisms.
Consequently, delivering revenue-generating applications over converged, Ethernet-based infrastructures creates a desire for a more secure access network.